Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Building a Fantasy Language 2: Sound System - Stress and Friends

In my last
post, I talked about different factors to consider when you create the writing
system for your fantasy language.Now
I’m going to talk about some things to think about when you’re deciding how your language should sound.

In my
experience, usually the first thing I want to do when I begin working on a
language is to start a word list.I’ve
hit a point in my story where someone should be speaking language X… usually
saying something like “Hello, how are you?The weather is good today.”But
if I just start making up random words and throwing them onto the page, they
may not seem like they’re all from the same language.All too often, they look like just what they
are: random words thrown onto a page that in no way belong to one coherent
language.And we’ve all read published
books where, yup, the author just threw random sounds onto the page and called
it language.Painful!(Editors, please don’t let us do this… )

So what’s the critical
factor that makes your language convincing to the reader?For a fantasy language, the critical factor
is probably sound.Not grammar, but sound.(The grammar geek in me hates to admit
this.)The reader who will actually go
to the appendix and read through my explanation of verb conjugations in
Allahoallurian is a rare bird.The
readers who will recognize at a glance that I put zero effort into my
language’s sound system are far more common.

Thus this
post.Or, actually, posts—I decided to split
the current topic into three parts, to keep this from being so long that no
sane human would want to read it at a sitting.The three parts are as follows: first, the topic of prosody.This is a
ten-dollar word that just means things like stress, pitch, tone, on a word level or on a phrase or sentence or
utterance level.(I’ll just talk about
the word level, which should be all that you need for a fantasy language.)Second, the topic of phonology, which deals with what sounds you have in a language, how
they are organized, and how they interact with each other.Third, the topic of syllable structure.How can
sounds be put together into words?(One
caveat about my breaking the topic up like this.Different issues in the linguistics of a
sound system are all tangled together.Complex stress rules are sensitive to syllable structure, syllable
structure is sensitive to phonology.So
you may eventually want to glance over all three sound system posts, even if
you originally thought you only needed to look at one.If there’s something not explained in one
post, maybe it’s explained in one of the others.If not, leave a comment! :)

Today… prosody.

Prosody (stress, tone, intonation,
pitch, accent, etc.etc. etc. etc.)

Prosody is a
very complicated topic that dozens of people have spent their entire lives
studying.Fortunately for me (since
prosody always confused me), only a few aspects of prosody are important for
building a fantasy language.

The most
important thing that you need to know is that there are three prosodic types of
languages (as far as I know).

Stress
languages like
English

Tone
languages like
Mandarin Chinese and many African languages

Pitch-accent
languages like
Japanese

In the three
sections below, if you get tired of the technical stuff you can skip to the end
and see my quick advice on how to handle each one of these for a fantasy
language.

Stress languages

What does it
mean to stress a syllable?In
various languages, people emphasize a syllable by making it louder, longer,
higher pitch, lower pitch… okay, basically people do all sorts of different
things in different languages.But
somehow or other they make that syllable stand out from other, unstressed syllables.

We are pretty
used to English word-stress rules.English usually assigns stress (decides to stress a syllable) based on things
like how many syllables there are in the word, what structure they have—that
kind of thing.(ENglish Usually asSIGNS
STRESS…) Occasionally, you find words that have a built-in stress pattern that
doesn’t seem to be based on the rules.For example:

NounsVerbs

COMpactcomPACT

PERvertperVERT

CONtractconTRACT

Obviously these
words aren’t being assigned stress based on length or syllable structure, since
they exist in contrasting pairs!Words
drawn from foreign languages may also mess with the stress rules by keeping the
stress they had in the language they were borrowed from.

Normally,
however, words in stress languages follow the rules, which assign stress based
on number of syllables and syllable structure.

STRESSAU-toCA-rousel

TRUEEN-glishBEAU-tiful

RUNJUMP-ingPAR-rying

GREENBLIND-lyAR-dently

INO-ver

There will be a
primary stress and, once the word is at least three syllables long, there may
be a secondary stress too, also assigned according to the rules.

Different languages
have different rules, but three common places to stress a word are the last
syllable, the next-to-last syllable, and the first syllable.

Even with rules,
there are complications…

Different types
of words in a given language may have different sets of stress rules.Verbs may have different stress rules than
nouns—in fact, they usually do.

Some types of
prefixes and suffixes, called clitics, do
not take stress and do not participate in the stress rules.For example, even if a language has a strong
stress rule that states “stress the final syllable,” a suffixed clitic will not
get stressed.Instead, the last syllable
before the clitic will get stressed.

Fantasy
Language Stress

If your
language is a stress-language, I would recommend that you choose which
syllable you want to stress and have all your words stress that
syllable.If you want to make your
language a little more complex, choose one syllable (such as the next-to-last)
for verbs and another (such as the last syllable) for all other words.You can mark a stressed syllable with a
little acute accent: ˊ.

ye-ru-sha-laímmam-la-káhmaʕ-yán

If you make up
a word and try to stress it according to your rule, but have a strong feeling
that the stress “just isn’t working” for this word, the syllable structure of
the word is probably causing the problem.(I’ll be posting about syllable structure shortly.)For now, just keep in mind that heavier
syllables (ones with long vowels, diphthongs, or endings involving more than
one consonant) tend to attract stress.

Tone
languages

In tone
languages, speakers use changing pitches (like changing notes when you
sing) to mark different syllables.Instead of the tone being assigned based on the length or syllable
structure of the word, the tone is assigned because it is integral to the
meaning of the word.In Mandarin
Chinese, ma with tone 1 is word that means something completely
different from ma with tone 2, and both mean something completely
different from ma with tone 3 and ma with neutral tone.

How many
different tones can you have in a tone language?In my experience, languages can have from two
to eight tones, with four being the average.Imagine having to distinguish between eight different intonations of ma!Generally speaking, languages that allow
longer words and more complicated syllable structures will have fewer
tones.Languages with shorter words and
simpler syllable structures will have more tones.

Many African
languages have two tones, a high tone (H) and a low tone (L).They need only two pitches, a high
pitch and a low pitch.

But in other
African languages, even though they still have only a high pitch and a low
pitch, they have four tones!How does
this work?Well, they have

tone HH – stays
at a high pitch

tone HL –
starts at a high pitch and goes down

tone LH –
starts low and goes up

tone LL – stays
at a low pitch

Some languages
add a third pitch, that is between the high and low pitches—the mid pitch
(M).Now how many tones can we have?

HH, HL, LH, LL
+

MM – stays at
the mid pitch

ML – starts mid
and goes down

MH – starts mid
and goes up

LM – starts low
and rises to mid

HM – starts high
and drops to low

With three
pitches, we can theoretically have nine tones!In reality, languages with H, L, and M pitches usually will not have all
nine of these tones.Some of them sound
really similar!

Are there any
more possible tones?Actually, yes!

LHL – starts low,
rises, then drops again

HLH – starts high,
drops, and then rises

LML, HMH, MLM,
MHM – (these are not very common.)

So that gives
us a total of 15 different possible tones!But as I said, languages will select from these.As far as I can tell, the Mandarin tones are
HH, LH, HL, HLH, and MM (the so-called neutral tone).

Fantasy
Language Tone

Tone can be
hard to do for a fantasy language, mostly because it is hard to put in a format
that your publisher will accept!If you
decide to use a tone language, I would suggest using either two or four
tones.

The accents for
tone go over the vowel.If you have
Microsoft Word, go to Insert -> Symbol and select “Combining Diacritical
Marks.”If you look at the selection of
accents that comes up, you should be able to find the right accents for tone.

Represent low
or falling tones with a grave accent: è à ì

Represent high
or rising tones with an acute accent: é á í

Represent LHL
tones with a circumflex: ê â î

Represent HLH
tones with a breve accent: ĕ ă ĭ

For other tones—take
a look at what your word processor has available, and pick from that.Whatever you choose, be consistent, and keep
track of what tones you have assigned to which words with which meanings!

Pitch-accent
languages

Pitch-accent languages
are complicated.They share some of the
characteristics of stress languages, and some of the characteristics of tone
languages—they’re in between the two.

So how does
that work?Basically, a rule assigns
stress to a particular syllable, based on number of syllables and syllable
structure, as in a stress language.However, the stress comes out in speech as a particular tone, usually a
high tone of some kind.AND—here’s the
thing that makes pitch-accent so complicated—based on which syllable ended up getting
stressed, tones will be assigned for all of the syllables in the word.

For example: (I’ll
make up some rules…)

If the last syllable
of a three syllable word is stressed (HH tone), both previous syllables receive
LL tone.

If the second
syllable of a three syllable word is stressed (HH tone), the first syllable
receives LL tone, and the final syllable receives HL tone.

If the second
syllable of a four syllable word is stressed (HH tone), the first syllable
receives LH tone, the third syllable receives HLH tone, and the fourth syllable
receives LL tone.

You can see
that this gets complicated pretty quickly!

I don’t have
much experience with pitch-accent languages, so I can’t give you any advice
about them… except that, if you are serious about using a pitch-accent
language, the best thing for you to do is probably to go and take a conversation
class in Japanese.This will help you to
attune your ear to the pitch-accent system.

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About Me

Kathryn McConaughy is a Christian and has studied biblical languages, linguistics, and ancient history. Most recently, she has been working on the fifth book in a series of young adult fantasies set in the world of King Arthur. She is the author of the ancient Near Eastern fairy tale "Guardian of Our Beauty" (in the anthology Five Magic Spindles), and the flash fiction story "A Bride-Price for Hinzuri" (in the May 2017 issue of Spark). When she’s not writing stories, she enjoys gardening, reading, sword-fighting, and writing papers on obscure aspects of Semitic grammar. Kathryn lives in Maryland with her list of dissertation ideas and her large personal library.